


Sorrow's Son - Ghosts

by Owlix



Series: Sorrow's Son [1]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Developing Relationship, Ghosts, M/M, Sadism, rejecting the series retcon, sadism because Ocelot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-16 16:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlix/pseuds/Owlix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>John misunderstands. Adamska doesn’t go looking for ghosts on purpose. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t want to see them at all. He’s spent years trying to look past them, pretending they aren’t there.</i>
</p><p><i>But what’s Adamska going to say? That he’s afraid of ghosts?</i><br/> </p><p>Adamska sees ghosts.  There is a dead woman that John would very much like to have a conversation with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrow's Son - Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> In this story, I am ignoring the MGS4 retcon. Instead I am sticking with the explanation implied in MGS3 - that Ocelot becomes possessed by Liquid because his father is the Sorrow, and he's inherited some of his father's abilities to interact with ghosts.

“I see ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” John says back, the way he tends to do.

Adamska refuses to look at his face. He’s too afraid of that man’s mockery, of his ridiculous broad grin. He feels the hot blush on his cheek, childish, and the shame of it just makes it burn hotter. He hates being young, and bristles at the silence, and snarls, “Don’t laugh!”

“I’m not laughing,” John says. And he isn’t. “I believe you.” He waits. But silence has always been John’s friend, and after a moment Adamska speaks to drive it away again.

“When I was a boy, I didn’t-” have any friends, he wants to say, but that sounds foolish. Childish, and he wants John to see that he’s a man. “The other boys didn’t know what to do with me,” he finally says instead. “I was alone.”

When he looks up, John is watching him intensely. His remaining eye too blue, his missing one a black hole. Hidden. Adamska wishes the man would display the mark his bullet had left there. Sloppy work, and done by accident - he could do it so much better now - but his, and the memory of that moment makes his heart beat fast. He fights the urge to flip the patch up, gloved right hand twitching, and looks away again.

“Alone,” John says, “with only ghosts to keep you company? Sounds pretty lonely.”

Adamska laughs and shakes his head. “I thought I was going mad. Thought that was what loneliness had done to me. Thought they were what a boy like me would conjure up instead of imaginary friends. Thought I would grow out of it as I grew older.”

“But you didn’t,” John says, his rough voice rapt, his blue eye utterly guileless and sincere. It makes no sense that a man like John could have had such honest, trusting eyes. Adamska knows what he is capable of, and yet... “You still see them,” John says. “The ghosts.”

“Yes,” Adamska admits. "I do."

“I believe you,” John says again. “I’ve seen them too.”

Everything about the man is so sincere that Adamska laughs. He waits for John to bristle or get angry, but he doesn’t. The man just sits there, silent in the way that only he can be, and Adamska is the one left feeling foolish.

“It was in Tselinoyarsk,” John says. His hand goes to his eye patch and lingers there. “Right after I lost this. You chased me to the waterfall, and I jumped.” And John looks over at him and smiles, as if the memory is a fond one to him too.

It is fond to Adamska. He has replayed it in his head so many times that it comes easily to him now. John - Snake, then - falling, stripped down to his trousers, the remains of his right eye bloody and dark, his hands above his head as the spray swallowed him up. Adamska remembers that single bullet, sitting unused in the next chamber of his revolver. When Adamska had fired on him, John had never even flinched.

“I passed out,” John says, “after I hit the water. When I woke, the river had become a river of the dead.” He shakes his head, briefly lost in the memory. “The men I’d killed there trudging towards me, their suffering, their...” He pauses, and seems unwilling to speak the word. “But it was only there, and it was because of him.”

The Sorrow. Adamska’s father, although he isn’t supposed to know that, but he is well trained, and smarter than his keepers.

“They said I must have hit my head. Didn’t believe me. But I knew you would.”

John’s casual faith in him blooms hot in his chest, an uncomfortable swell of pleasure. Adamska does his best to keep it from his face, but John isn’t even looking.

“Sometimes I wonder...” John says, and he finally looks up to meet Adamska’s gaze. “Do you think that was hell?” He asks with the intensity of a man who believes that such a place exists, and who expects to go there.

The question makes Adamska uncomfortable. The ghosts have never said anything to him of heaven or hell or God. He’s left speechless, and once again feeling foolish.

“Sorry,” John says with a grim smile. He reaches into his pocket and takes out one of his big, thick cigars, already half-smoked. “Guess you don’t know the answer any more than me.”

Adamska’s nostrils flare at the scent of tobacco. A disgusting habit, he’d thought at first. But he’d come to associate the smell of cigar smoke with John’s closeness. He can no longer separate it from the scent of the man’s sweat and skin. He remembers, after Groznyj Grad, watching A Fistfull of Dollars on opening night, and then every night, for weeks - staring up at Clint Eastwood with a cigar between his teeth.

“Is that who you see, too?” John asks him, abruptly. “The ghosts of men you’ve killed?”

“Sometimes,” Adamska admits. “Not often.”

“Then who?” John asks. “Who do you see?” His blue eye isn’t guileless any more. His gaze is just as rapt, but calculating. Adamska has something the man wants. That’s chilling and exciting, both at the same time. He holds onto the feeling, tries to memorize it.

“Children,” Adamska says. “When I was young they were... orphan children. I was ” - There’s something about John that makes him stupidly honest, and he goes stiff and looks away again, flustered by his own words - “raised in an orphanage.”

If John understands the shame in that, it doesn’t show. He simply nods and waits for Adamska to go on.

“In the orphanage, I saw children who had died there. After I left, I started seeing... others.”

“So you see them where they died...” John says, half to himself.

“Sometimes. Some of them” - Adamska’s father - “Some of them can go where they wish. Some stay where they die. Some follow their corpse.”

“So if we went back,” John says, leaning in. He reaches across the space between them and grasps Adamska’s shoulder with one strong, sure hand. “The two of us. Back to Tselinoyarsk, to the lily field... Would you see her?”

And it is all clear. That was why Adamska had something he wanted. Because of her. The Boss.

His mother, although he doesn’t think of her that way. The knowledge had come too late, and she was nothing like the woman he had imagined his mother would be. He tells himself that, so her disdain for him won’t matter. She did cast him aside, but she cast him aside for John. Adamska, sick at heart, can understand.

“I don’t know,” Adamska says, but it’s a lie. He’s sure that she would be there if he went looking for her. Sure of it in his bones. “Even if I did see her, you wouldn’t.”

“No, that’s all right.” John stands and paces away, still clutching his unlit cigar in his right hand. “It doesn’t matter. You could ask her for me. You could tell me what she says.”

John misunderstands. Adamska doesn’t go looking for ghosts on purpose. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t want to see them at all. He’s spent years trying to look past them, pretending they aren’t there.

But what’s Adamska going to say? That he’s afraid of ghosts?

“I could,” he says, stiffly, instead. “I may take some convincing.”

John sits down again, shoulders loose, his face relaxed in an easy grin. “It’s decided, then. We’ll go. The two of us. Not now” - he waves away Adamska’s protest - “We’re too damned busy for it now. Anyway, I don’t think she’s going anywhere.” His laughter is bitter and pained. He finally lights his cigar, and after a moment all Adamska can smell is smoke.

John’s hands are scarred. His fingernails are short and dirty. Adamska notices a purple bruise has blossomed under one of them, put there by someone other than himself. Injuries suit the man - he wears them well. It has been a long time since Adamska has seen him. At least, it feels like it has, the way Adamska has been waiting for this. John lifts the cigar to his lips, dragging Adamska’s gaze along with it. John’s lips are very slightly parted, his cigar between them.

“You can just ask,” John says, exhaling smoke.

Adamska’s shoulders stiffen. “I can - what?” He snaps the words out, unintentionally sharp - half confused, half angry, and not at all the way that he’d intended.

John leans back in his chair. “I said,” he says, that crooked grin on his face, “you can just ask. I see you staring. I know you want to ask. So ask.”

Adamska makes a fist. Tries not to stutter. “I’m not staring.”

John laughs, warm and rough. “Sure, kid. If you say so.”

Adamska swallows, dry. He tries to make his mouth work. Looks John up and down, keeping his eyes moving, in an attempt to keep from staring. John’s body is uncoiled and open, his legs parted,  his shoulders rolled back, but still nothing like harmless.

It is not in Adamska's nature to ask, but for a moment he tries.

John stretches an arm out, languid and easy, holding out his half-smoked cigar. “Here,” he says. It takes Adamska a moment to realize that the man wants him to take it, and another moment to figure out why. Once again, John misunderstands.

Adamska doesn’t know if he should feel relieved or frustrated. He sneers, wrinkles up his nose disdainfully at John’s cigar and doesn’t take it.

John gives it a little shake and holds it out further. “Give it a try. It’ll be good for a kid like you. Put some hair on your chest.”

“I already have hair on my chest,” Adamska says, but he takes the cigar anyway. It’s a challenge, now - no way to turn it down. His hand brushes John’s as he takes it, warm through his gloves.

He puts his lips around it, where John’s lips were a moment before. John is watching him, one blue eye coldly amused. Adamska inhales.

It’s terrible, hotter and stronger first-hand. He tries to maintain his dignity, but coughs until tears come to his eyes. He can hear John laughing at him, quietly, and feels himself blushing all the way to his ears.

When he can do so, he stands. He hurtles the cigar at John, aiming for his face. John catches it effortlessly, not even changing his posture, but by the time he holds it in front of his face, Adamska has already drawn his gun.

John whistles, long and low. “You’ve gotten faster,” he says, grinning. “Must’ve been practicing. Good.”

Praise from the man is a kick of pleasure in his gut, but Adamska doesn’t lower the gun. John spends a long moment staring at the barrel. Then, still grinning, he meets Adamska’s eyes over it, leans back in his chair, and slowly raises his hands to the level of his shoulders. His cigar still sits perched in the fingers of his right hand, trailing a thin line of smoke.

Adamska inhales deep and holds it in, nearly overwhelmed. He resists the urge to close his eyes. He’s been waiting for a moment like this, and plans to remember it.

John seems to recognize the expression. His grin grows faintly wider. He tilts his head up and takes a pull from his cigar without changing the position of his hands, exposing his throat. Adamska catches himself staring again. John settles back and exhales smoke.

“I have been training,” Adamska says, recovering himself. He twirls his gun, once, giving John an opening, but the man doesn’t even try to take it. John seems content to sit there and listen, confident that Adamska won’t shoot him in the middle of his own camp. “And not just with my guns.”

“Oh?” John seems sincerely intrigued. Adamska recognizes that expression - the man wants to play. “What, then? Blades? Hand to hand?”

“No.” Adamska doesn’t expect John’s approval. He tries for proud and indifferent, but his words come out sounding petulant. “Interrogation.”

John snorts in disappointment. He starts to get up, but Adamska pointedly trains his revolver at his chest. John settles back down again in his chair, impatiently, hands still raised.

Adamska understands the man’s disapproval. He’d felt that way, once, when he was younger and ignorant. He sees things differently now. All thanks to John. In taking one of the man’s eyes, Adamska had fully opened up his own.

Adamska had always craved intimacy. To be known, and to know others. He had come to understand what true intimacy was, in that bleak concrete room that smelled like piss and fear and gun smoke and searing flesh. And once he had seen that, once he had truly understood it...

Well, things had changed.

“Torture,” John says, disappointment apparent in his voice, and shakes his head.

“No,” Adamska says mildly, correcting him. “Interrogation. There’s a difference.”

But he quietly wonders if there is, really. All torture is interrogation, of a sort. A digging into another man’s mind and heart. A tearing away of pretense, until what’s left is only truth.

Adamska had thought he’d known what intimacy was, before. He understands it better now. No intimacy given freely could ever approach the rawness that he’d seen that afternoon. Nothing John could give him could ever match what they had taken. Everything else was controlled, manipulated, managed. That afternoon - John pissing his pants in fear and pain; John’s lower lip quivering in anticipation of being unmade by the woman who had made him; the way that John had known, even then, where the single bullet had been in Adamska’s revolvers - those moments were truer than anything Adamska had seen before, or since.

Later that afternoon, Volgin had come up to him, a grin on his face. “You do fancy him,” he’d said, one hand on Adamska’s shoulder. “I was right. Tell you what, Ocelot. I’ll let you play with him yourself tomorrow.” And Adamska had gone dizzy with the anticipation of it, despite himself. Overwhelmed with the possibilities. What else could he take from him? What other brilliant truths would he reveal?

Truth is what matters. Truth is his business. And this is truth, and the surest way Adamska can find it.

John doesn’t understand any of that. He shakes his head. “It’s a waste,” John says. “You’re better than that. You have potential.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I should be doing,” Adamska says, “or how.” But John just looks at the revolver - his suggestion - and grins, and Adamska can feel himself blushing like a child again.

He takes a step forward and opens his mouth to speak. The ground under him lurches - not the ground, but the rug - and he catches a glimpse of John’s leg as the man tugs the rug back with one shoe. Adamska tries to right himself. His spur is tangled in the rug, and he can’t free it. He goes down awkward, and then John is on top of him. Fires his gun once before John can take it from him - the bullet whizzes past the man, grazing his shoulder on his blind side.

Adamska gets one good hit on John before he’s entirely incapacitated. John has been practicing too, and Adamska never had a chance against the man’s judo up close. John doesn’t even have to hit him, just twists his arm around behind him, bending it all the wrong ways. Every movement shoots pain down his wrist and arm and back. Adamska snarls, practically hissing, but lays still.

John is heavy on top of him, and hot. He smells like cigar smoke and male sweat, earth and gunpowder. This close, Adamska can see the little wrinkles on his face. Can feel his breath against his cheek. He has had dreams like this, just as painful. Has spent too many nights thinking about unlikely applications for John’s judo. He looks at his own handiwork - a growing bloodstain on John’s right shoulder, a trickle of blood from the man’s nose. Excitement and arousal hit him like a blow, so hard he flinches.

One of John’s men knocks on the door, then opens it a crack and peers inside. “Everything all right, Boss?” he asks. “We heard a shot.”

Adamska stares at the man, upside down, from his undignified position on John’s rumpled rug. Above him, John grins. “Fine,” he says. “Under control.” And he shooes the man away with a jerk of his chin. The man nods. He glances one last time at Adamska, and leaves, and shuts the door behind him.

John pushes the muzzle of Adamska’s revolver up against his throat. “Behave,” he says. It’s not difficult to obey him, when he speaks that way . Adamska meets John’s gaze and stays still.

John tucks the revolver away behind his belt, well out of Adamska’s reach, and keeps his grip on Adamska’s left wrist. Businesslike, John pats him down with his free hand.

Adamska behaves. John’s right hand traces its way across his body, thoroughly. He finds and takes Adamska’s other revolver. He finds his knife, and takes that too. He checks his belt, grips his thighs and checks down each of his pant legs, while Adamska lays still and clings to what’s left of his dignity. Finished with his legs, and having found nothing, John checks the crotch of Adamska’s trousers.

Adamska swears and struggles, ashamed. John chuckles. “Huh,” he says. “Guess Eva was right after all.”

“Eva?” Adamska fights against John’s hold on him and manages only to hurt his shoulder. “That bitch! What’s she saying about me?”

John chuckles. “That I should’ve let her shoot you. Among other things.” He reaches around behind his belt and takes out Adamska’s gun. Adamska goes still again. There is something very interesting about John’s big hand on his revolver. He knows that he is staring, but he can’t stop.

“Adamska,” John says.

Hearing John call him by his real name yanks Adamska like a leash. He drags his gaze away from the gun to meet John’s blue eye.

“I’m flattered, but -” John says -

and Adamska winces, waiting for the rest. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. Any intimacy he wants from John can be taken, and will be truer for it. But when John leans in closer, Adamska knows it to be a lie.

“- you’re still too young for me,” John finishes, rough and low and grinning. “Come back in a year or two.”

Adamska blinks his eyes and squints, stunned. Wants to slap himself to clear his head, settles for shaking it.

John flips the cylinder of Adamska’s revolver open and spills the five remaining bullets out onto Adamska’s chest, where they lay heavy. He tosses the gun aside, somewhere on the floor. He stands, and doesn’t offer Adamska a hand up. Adamska hears him place his other revolver and his knife on his desk. He struggles to sit, his right arm aching.

Outside, the sun is going down. John retrieves his fallen cigar and lights it. He gives Adamska one last grin before he leaves, and shuts the door behind himself.

Adamska is left to gather up his revolver and his bullets alone in the growing dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to everyone who encouraged me to post this. I decided this works okay by itself so I'm posting it as-is. I'm working on a sequel and will post it soon.


End file.
